From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans

CHAPTER 2

Know Your Customer

When you hear the word customer, who comes to mind?

If you’re like many people, you associate the word customer with external consumers of your company’s products and services—the people who actually purchase and use your business’s offerings. To create a great customer experience, however, it’s important to define the term customer more broadly.

While the individual (or institution) that actually buys your goods is the ultimate customer, there are often other constituencies involved in the transaction that your company is also serving. These stakeholders represent a type of customer, as well, and so there is an opportunity to engineer a customer experience that impresses them, too.

Let’s consider some examples: ...